Faith, Fabrications, and Fantasy (Part 2)After more than $1 billion in handouts,
Bush's results-impaired
faith-based initiative is coming to a state near youby Bill Berkowitz
www.dissidentvoice.org
February 14, 2005

After
four years and more than one billion dollars given to faith-based
organizations, are they serving the needs of the poor as well as secular
organizations or government-run agencies? Certainly, with an administration
obsessed with “results,” there must be studies proving the efficacy of its
faith-based theories. But there aren't; few if any such studies exist,
writes Amy Sullivan in the October 2004 issue of the Washington Monthly.
In a story entitled “Faith Without Works: After four years, the president's
faith-based policies have proven to be neither compassionate nor
conservative,” Sullivan points out that the administration has failed to
systematically track and “monitor the effectiveness” of programs run by
faith-based organizations.

The policy of funding
the work of faith-based organizations has, in the face of slashed social
service budgets, devolved into a small pork-barrel program that offers token
grants to... religious constituencies... while making almost no effort to
monitor their effectiveness...

“Results, results,
results,” was Bush's oft-repeated mantra going as far back as the 2000
campaign. Sullivan cites an interview, from that campaign, with the
religious Web site Beliefnet, where Bush was asked whether he would
support government money going to a Muslim group that taught prisoners the
Koran. “The question I'd be asking,” Bush replied, “is what are the
recidivism rates? Is it working? I wouldn't object at all if the program
worked.” According to Sullivan, “four more times in the interview, Bush
mentioned ‘results,’ noting that instead of promoting religion, ‘I'm
promoting lower recidivism rates, and we will measure to make sure that's
the case.’”

Where do we stand in
terms of measuring “results?” According to Sullivan, “it turns out that the
Bush administration forgot to require evaluation of organizations that
receive government grants.” An August 2004 study released by the Pew-funded
Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy found that “while more
elaborate scientific studies are underway, the White House has relied on
largely anecdotal evidence to support the view that faith-based approaches
produce better long-term results.”

Sullivan concludes
that “there is no evidence that faith-based organizations work better than
their secular counterparts; and, in some cases, they are actually less
effective”:

In one study funded by
the Ford Foundation, investigators found that faith-based job training
programs placed only 31 percent of their clients in full-time employment
while the number for secular organizations was 53 percent. And Teen
Challenge's [a Texas-based drug program often spoken highly of by Bush] much
ballyhooed 86 percent rehabilitation rate falls apart under examination --
the number doesn't include those who dropped out of Teen Challenge and
relies on a disturbingly small sample of those graduates who self-reported
whether they had remained sober, significantly tilting the results.

In August 2003, Mark
Kleinman of Slate, the online magazine, took a close look at Charles
Colson's Prison Fellowship program called the InnerChange Freedom
Initiative, a Bible-centered prison program. Examining a University of
Pennsylvania study that claimed high success rates for the InnerChange
program, Kleinman found that the InnerChange participants actually did
somewhat worse than the control group and were slightly more apt to be
re-arrested and re-imprisoned.

In order to reach its
preordained conclusion, the Penn study employed “selection bias” or
“creaming”, Kleinman pointed out, allowing InnerChange to ignore
participants that dropped out or were kicked out of the program, or who, for
some other reasons, never finished the program.

Bush's faith-based
initiative finds a home in the states

In Bush's second term,
he is “setting [his] sights on money doled out by the states,” for social
services, the Associated Press recently reported. “The goal is to
persuade states to funnel more of the federal money for social service
programs that they administer to ‘faith-based organizations.’”

To encourage states to
participate, the White House has hosted a series of conferences. Jim Towey,
the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives who was also recently appointed Assistant to the President, has
met with state leaders and the president “has personally lobbied governors,”
AP reported. “The White House office also is providing states with technical
assistance in setting up their own faith-based offices.” Thus far some 21
governors -- both Democrat and Republican -- have set up their own
faith-based offices.

The White House isn't
alone in tutoring faith-based groups about how to apply for government
grants. The Community & Faith-Based Grants Institute, an organization run by
the Tucson, Arizona-based
Faith-Based Institute is offering a “video seminar on Faith Based
Initiative grant writing [which] picks up where the free grant writing
seminars by the government leave off.”

The Institute has
lined up an impressive array of former administration insiders and veterans
of various U.S. charities as seminar instructors, including Dave Donaldson,
the founder and CEO of
We Care America, “an organization that identifies faith-based models and
works to strengthen and multiply them to help those in need”; Michael
McCarthy, manager of
The Center for Capacity Development, “a fee-for-service division of The
WorkPlace, Inc., Southwestern Connecticut's Regional Workforce Development
Board”; Amy Sherman, a Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute's Welfare Policy
Center and the founder and former executive director of Charlottesville
Abundant Life Ministries, “a holistic, cross-cultural, whole-family,
church-based outreach in an urban neighborhood of approximately 380
lower-income, single-parent families”; and Dr. Stanley Carlson-Thies, the
Director of the Civitas Program in Faith in Public Affairs,
The Center for Public Justice and former OFBCI staff member.

Jim Towey sees a
bright future for faith-based organizations to shoulder a larger part of the
load in providing for people in need.

“We're on the sunrise
side of the mountain,” he proclaimed.

While it's a long way
from the cushy air-conditioned offices of Jim Towey's White House Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to the dusty devastated streets of
Fallujah, the president's War in Iraq and his faith-based crusade may have a
lot more in common than at first meets the eye.

Bush's war in Iraq was
built on fabrications, faith and fantasy: The administration fabricated
claims about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein's
relationship with al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, and the Iraqi dictator's
connection to 9/11. Bush faithfully believed it when his wild-eyed
neoconservative advisors fantasized that U.S. troops would be welcomed with
open arms by the people of Iraq, and that reconstruction would be a “slam
dunk,” to borrow a phrase from former CIA director George Tenet. The neocons
were wrong and reconstruction has been a non-starter.

The president's
faith-based initiative -- the centerpiece of his domestic policy agenda --
is also a combination of fabrications, faith, and fantasy. Despite concrete
data, the Bush administration insisted that faith-based organizations would
provide social services to the poor and addicted more effectively than
secular programs. No data existed four years ago, and little more than
anecdotal evidence exists today.

President Bush's long
hard slog in Iraq has produced death, destruction and a powerful insurgency.
As poverty deepens at home, the president's faith-, fabrication-, and
fantasy-based initiative is heading toward a state near you.

Bill Berkowitz
is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His
WorkingForChange.com column Conservative Watch documents the
strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American
Right.